Word Salad

I abjure the hidebound timorousness that vituperates turgid language for its turbidity. What's so hard to understand?

Well, for one thing, that sentence.

But after dedicating my life to the quotidian prose promulgated by the penurious martinets preserving pedestrian newspaper linguistics, I will venture to catechize this pertinacious interdiction through blandishment and periphrastic legerdemain.

Or maybe I should just get this out of my system.

According to the Oxford University Press, there are some 750,000 words in English, including variations and distinct senses, technical jargon and derivative or obsolete words.

A linguist once told me just 50 of these words represent 40 percent of usage and 99 percent of usage consists of just 16,000 words.

English is a rich, constantly evolving language with a solid core. It seems a shame we limit ourselves to so little, especially in the newspaper business.

Sentences like the first few above serve no purpose beyond farce, as their dense pomposity only stultifies comprehension as though soused in some jejune writer's bacchanalian word orgy. There I go again.

If an average reader needs to stop and look up a strange word, or if a reader simply continues to read without understanding the point, a writer has failed. If anything, a journalist often seeks to prune complicated gobbledygook into plain speech.

For example, tintinnabulary is a peculiar word I only learned four years ago while studying for the GRE. It's an adjective to describe something pertaining to bells or the ringing of bells. It has a delicate onomatopoeia reflecting both the tinkling of tiny bells and the gonging of more hefty bells.

In reality, it's something of a useless word — describing something about something that could be better shown than explained.

But a properly chosen, less common word can elevate a sentence — carrying the reader along to a new level of understanding. And then we just need to take that dictionary off the shelf.

I'm particularly fond of the term phlegmatic. It's more common derivation, phlegm, helps envision what the adjective seeks to describe: something calm, sluggish or unemotional.

And I love how we can choose among a smorgasbord of words to call someone stubborn: implacable, inexorable, intractable, intransigent, obdurate, obstinate, pertinacious, recalcitrant, refractory, renitent and untoward.

Is it any of these — or worse, hoity-toity — to insist on using an occasional wholesale word in our retail world?

Grant Barrett is a vice president of communications and technology for the American Dialect Society working as a lexicographer on two dictionary projects while co-hosting a weekly national radio show on language. Though he's been learning English since birth and studying it most of his adult life, he still encounters new words every day.

"Most words are new to most people most of the time," Barrett said.

Which might get us all off the hook. And that's no badinage.